


Took My Life To Make

by cosmic_llin



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: 5 Things, Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Podfic Available
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 21:31:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7591192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_llin/pseuds/cosmic_llin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five uses for an abandoned starship</p>
            </blockquote>





	Took My Life To Make

1\. Sanctuary

Jaylah ran, her staff still in her hand, her blood pounding in her ears as her feet pounded on the rock.  
  
Dead, all of them. She was the only one left. She'd seen her father cut down before she'd fled. The picture of Manas, his teeth bared as he killed him, was burned into her.  
  
She didn't even know why she was running - what was the point when her family was dead and their ship was destroyed and she was alone on a strange planet? But her father had screamed at her to run with his last breath, so that was what she did, tears clouding her vision, stumbling through trees and up scree slopes, running because anything was better than stopping and thinking about everything that had just happened. She wasn't sure anyone was even chasing her any more. It hardly mattered.  
  
She stopped herself just short of running straight into the hull of the crashed vessel, with a jolt and a gasp. And just like that she'd stopped, without even deciding to. She glared up at the vastness of the ship, contemplating how hard it would be to just climb across it and keep going.  
  
But her momentum was gone, and she'd been running for a long time. Her mouth was dry and her limbs shook. Night was falling, and even with her staff she was afraid that there might be predators that would attack her when darkness fell.  
  
Perhaps she could hide inside this ship. It was certainly abandoned - small plants were growing up against it, and it was dark and quiet, no sign of sentient life.  
  
If she couldn't run then she would turn her attention to finding a way inside.  
  
She looked around her, to be sure that nobody had followed her, and then she began to climb over the skin of the ship, looking for a door. It was hard in the fading light, and she scraped her palms on the hull, but at last she found one that she could lever open with her staff, and crawled inside, into the welcoming darkness. She pulled the door almost closed behind her and curled into a ball.  
  
Too much to think about. Too much to feel. She wanted to cry but she couldn't. It was better to stare into the dark until sleep claimed her. She was exhausted enough that it didn’t take long.

 

2\. Renovation Project

As little as she wanted it to, morning came. Or rather, afternoon did. By the time Jaylah woke the sun was already high in the sky. There was no moment of confusion while she struggled to remember where she was - as soon as she opened her eyes the full weight of events settled back on her like a stone in her stomach. But as much as she'd felt, yesterday, that there was no point in being alive without her family, this morning her hunger and thirst made the case for survival. She didn't want to be here, but since she was, she should probably find something to eat.  
  
***  
  
There were packs of grey paste that looked like they might be food, and did prove to be edible. There were some large tanks of water. For the first few days Jaylah lived off what she could find on the ship while she got her bearings, rigged up the holograms to hide her new house. A new purpose suggested itself - this was a ship. It could fly. All she needed was to stay here long enough to figure out how, and then she could leave this place behind.  
  
She made a systematic survey of the ship - the house, as she began to think of it. There were things left there, interesting things. She gathered some of them in the eating area.  
  
She could make this a good place to live. There was space, and resources. She had time.  
  
When she'd cleared a suitable area, she sang the knisshent for her family. She was only a half-adult - old enough to have taken her family's tattoo and carry her own staff, but not old enough to have a full vote in the family council. She technically shouldn't have performed the mourning rite - but if she didn't, who would? So she sang it, all fourteen stanzas, tears pouring down her cheeks at last, and then she carried on clearing away the debris.

 

3\. School

It was a couple of months before she got the computers working, and then more months of trial and error before she could do anything useful with them. She stumbled across a database of what seemed to be entertainment - music, audiovisual stories, and marks that must be writing, if only she could read it.  
  
She started with the audiovisual files - they were a little like having company, faces and voices even if they couldn't talk back to her. They depicted members of lots of different species, unfamiliar ones. Sometimes she could almost follow the stories, when they were simple enough. Some of them were funny - visual comedy that she could appreciate without needing to speak the language. Some nights she sat with her meal that she'd made in her galley - meat she'd killed, things from her new garden, rations she’d scavenged from other crashed ships - and watched hours of incomprehensible stories, filling in the gaps with her imagination. After a while she thought she was picking up a few words, but her progress was frustratingly slow. If she could speak the language she could find instructions on how to make the ship fly.  
  
She sorted through the files and found what she wanted. Children's programming. Simple, bright stories and educational material. She devoted at least a few hours each day to watching them, slowly adding to her vocabulary, learning their strange alphabet.  
  
Once she could read and understand a little, the ship's database opened itself up to her. It was full of useful and interesting things, and once she could read she could use the technical manuals, the historical database, the structured learning programmes. Her vocabulary grew, and she began to repair the ship's systems, beginning with the easiest fixes and working her way up.

 

4\. Gymnasium

Jaylah got most of her meat from traps, and her vegetable garden was thriving, but she hunted small game occasionally to keep her reflexes sharp for the day she would kill the man who killed her father. It was good to be active, to burn enough energy to be tired enough to sleep at the end of the day.

One rainy season a few years after she'd arrived, she got impatient with running outside in the rain, or sitting inside and getting bored. She dragged things from all over the ship - furniture and unused boxes - and made herself an obstacle course with things to jump and climb and dodge. She added a rope to swing from, hanging from the ceiling, tied with good, strong knots. She rigged a mechanism that swung a spare bit of deck plating back and forth in her path.

Then she ran it, with her music pounding to put fire in her blood, trying to beat her own times, competing with herself. She jumped, dove, spun, ran, ducked, rolled.

She made herself holographic sparring partners to keep her fighting skills sharp. They weren't as intelligent as a real opponent but they were enough to train with.

Occasionally when she ventured close to the camp, she encountered Krall's teams. They didn't seem to actively look for her any more, but she sometimes saw them when they were retrieving the crews of other downed ships, and sometimes they attacked her. Or she attacked them, if she was feeling like a fight that day. That kept her skills sharp too, but she always felt strange and angry for a few days afterward.

A few times, later, she tried to free others, tried to escape with them on their ships. It never worked. She kept trying anyway.

 

5\. Chariot

The house burst free of Altamid’s atmosphere and Jaylah’s world lurched on its axis. It was over. It was done. For so long, all she’d thought about was avenging her father’s death and getting off this planet, and now it was happening. Manas was dead. She was free.

It wasn’t that she’d never thought about what would happen next, but it had never seemed real. Back home, when she was younger, she’d had all kinds of ideas about what she might do with her life. Could she go back to any of them now? The solitude of her life on Altamid was all she knew. She had no idea where she would go next, what she would do, how the universe had changed in her absence.

But there was time to learn.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Took My Life To Make](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8002018) by [knight_tracer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/knight_tracer/pseuds/knight_tracer)




End file.
